In online gaming, game hosting services and game developers have created a number of ways to track and personalize the online gaming experience. One drawback of existing systems is that many of the features have grown up independent of each other. Games send blobs of data about gamers back and forth to a central service, but the service has no way to understand and aggregate the data outside of the game context. Games can host their own Websites, but the data displayed there is not universally accessible to other games.
In a sense, then, the service and games offer two parallel communities that offer great—but separated—resources for gamers. First, in the game community, while playing a game, the gamer can see the community of others who play the specific game, the leaderboards for that game, and his personal achievements in that game. A game can tell a gamer, from the Service data, if a Friend is online, but it can't tell the gamer what, exactly that Friend is doing on the Service or when he will be available.
Second, in the service community, the service knows a gamer player's history, all of the games he's played, the amount of time he spends online, the size of his Friends list and all of the games that Friends have played or are playing, the Friends invites sent and received, the Messages sent and received, and all of the Feedback the gamer has given and received.
Systems have tried to leverage these on-line communities to match various players to allow them to play multi-player games. Nevertheless, in general such systems, which typically emphasize skill or experience in a single game or small family of games, do not allow groups of players who are likely to enjoy shared interaction based on a variety of personal considerations to form a group outside of the game context and then collectively engage in a multiplayer game.
In general, console-based matchmaking and competitions systems have been limited by the creativity and resources of each individual game development team. Each team must write its own match and competitions interface. For gamers, this means that he or she must relearn the matchmaking or competitions UI each time. Since each game creates its own matchmaking and competitions systems, gamers have had no way to view match and competition options across a service. Gamers have little sense of where the biggest communities of players are or which ones are hosting the most competitions.
Further, because matchmaking interfaces have typically been part of each individual game's code, gamers have not had the ability to create a match with other players in one game and then roam with that group of players to another game.
While some games have used the Web for creating, managing, and viewing the status of console competitions, the experience has involved a complex series of steps for gamers and for game developers to make it work. Further, the Web competition management systems have been tied closely to a particularly family of games developed. Games outside of the family of titles cannot benefit from the Web system.